Just as his narration in the “Confessions” has no other source than the bottomless and treacherous memory, Augustine has no other way of dealing with time than human speech. Both memory and speech attempt to concentrate time into a kind of unity, which is enabled by the extentionless unity of the eternity where the temporal processes are included in an atemporal way.

This chapter presents reading scenes in the “Confessions” as models for an individual’s reading as a social or intersubjective act, and places Augustine’s work in the cognitive ecology of the late Roman Empire.

This chapter analyzes the various avenues of the reception of the “Confessions” in the Middle Ages, based on extant manuscripts, medieval florilegia, and handbooks such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences. While the “Confessions” was one of Augustine’s best-known works, surprisingly there is very little evidence of direct reception, and Petrarch, who was an avid reader of the “Confessions,” rejected its basic premise of conversion in and devoting oneself completely to God, although the work did serve as a major source for medieval biographies of Augustine. The reception of the “Confessions” in the Middle Ages mirrored that of Augustine himself, whereby what we find upon close analysis is an ambiguous reception that is far less than the influence Augustine had in general.

The complexity of its themes and concerns suggests that Augustine anticipated multiple audiences for the “Confessions,” including his critics within the Catholic and Donatist churches of North Africa and his former compatriots among the Manichaean community. For the former, it served as an apology, demonstrating the authenticity of his spiritual development away from his Manichaean past. For the latter, it served both as a polemic, cleverly criticizing Manichaeism in the guise of self-condemnation, and as a protreptic, offering himself as an exemplar of a path to conversion commensurable with those spiritual values he could appreciate in the Manichaeans, despite their heresy.

To introduce an introduction, first a few words about the subject of this Companion, about Augustine’s Confessions.

In the “Confessions,” Augustine presents himself to the reader as the object of God’s grace. His life is not interesting as such but is the place where God’s grace operates. God’s grace in Augustine’s life is not limited to information and help, rather it is a deep and direct influence of God on the most internal part of one’s soul.

In the ancient world, friendship is taken to be essential to happiness. This paper aims to study what role friendship plays in Augustine’s account of his conversion in his “Confessions.” In this work, the relation between friendship and happiness is actually embedded in the narrative. Friendship seems ambivalent, but Augustine redefines it as a contributing to a shared progress toward God.

This chapter examines the reception of Augustine’s “Confessions” in autobiographical writing, drama, and poetry in Western Europe in the period 1500–1650.

This chapter is a survey of the genesis of the book “Confessions,” including reflections on the title, structure, date, influences, and style; an examination of the conversational structure of the text, including the dialogic form in relation to “Confessions” as a prayer; and an analysis of the terminology of “confession” as both positive (praise) and negative (admission of wrongdoing).

The theme of creation and recreation is at the heart of “Confessions,” and traces two moments in God’s relation to the world that are distinct and yet inseparable. On one hand, creation and recreation beckon toward their unity within the Trinitarian God: the Father forms creation through the eternal Word (Son) and within the Spirit’s love, and recreates through the eternal Word incarnate in Christ. On the other hand, creation and recreation disclose the fundamental ontological and moral character of human existence.

Analyzing the work book by book, this essay discusses the many aspects of sin and concupiscence in Augustine’s “Confessions.” It leads to the conclusion that confessio in the sense of confession of sexual sins is an essential feature of the title and contents of Augustine’s most famous writing.

This chapter highlights the challenges of understanding the generic make-up of the “Confessions” by looking at issues like “the unity” of the “Confessions” and various suggestions and difficulties involved in describing its structure and its genre. The section on structure focuses mostly on various ways of categorizing the units of content within the work, including a concise overview of a variety of proposals that have been made in this regard. The section on genre highlights the generic labels that are most frequently attached to the work (like autobiography, exegesis, protreptic, or apologetic), suggests some others, and also points toward the innovative fusion of antecedent generic conventions that constitutes the “Confessions.”

Augustine experienced an aversio a Deo and then a conversio ad Deum. He highlights the foundational importance of conversion, which comprised both the gift of God’s grace and the responsibility of a human being. The pair aversio a Deo/conversio ad Deum constitutes a continuous dialectical process until the conversio ad Deum of human beings will find its fulfillment. To explicate this idea, Augustine often uses images, such as, the homeland and the way, the two cities, the morning and the evening.